Karl Raimund Popper British philosopher of Austrian origin Date of Birth: 28.07.1902 Country: Great Britain

Biography of Karl Raimund Popper

Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) was an Austrian-born British philosopher and sociologist. He was born in Vienna on July 28, 1902, into a prominent family of lawyers. Initially aligned with socialists and communists, Popper later renounced socialist ideas, realizing that they caused more harm than good. The cultural atmosphere of Vienna in the early 20th century, encompassing music, science, philosophy, and political ideas, greatly influenced him.

Popper enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1918, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. He independently read books on philosophy during this time. From 1920 to 1922, he considered pursuing a career as a professional musician and joined Arnold Schoenberg's "Society for Private Concerts." He studied composition at the Vienna Conservatory for a year but eventually concluded that he lacked sufficient talent for music. He then shifted his focus to becoming a cabinet maker from 1921 to 1924 while also engaging in social work and participating in school reform. He volunteered at Alfred Adler's children's clinics, where Adler's confident diagnoses, made without even examining the patients, made Popper question psychoanalysis and "clinical data." This, combined with false claims of Marxism's scientific nature and his study of Albert Einstein's works, led him to formulate the principle of falsification.

Popper became one of the first members of the Pedagogical Institute at the University of Vienna, where he met Karl Bühler, who later supervised his dissertation on the problem of method in psychology. Bühler's linguistic ideas influenced Popper's concepts of language and World 3. After completing his university studies, Popper married Josefine Anna Henninger and taught mathematics and physics in the upper classes of a Viennese gymnasium. It was during this time that Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, associated with the Vienna Circle, actively promoted the "verification principle." This prompted Popper to develop and subsequently publish his own ideas on demarcation and induction.

Popper's first published book, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (Logik der Forschung, 1935), gained widespread recognition for its critique of inductivism, defense of philosophy, and the introduction of "falsifiability" as a criterion for science. He also asserted that metaphysical theories can be meaningful even if they are not falsifiable. Popper continued teaching at the gymnasium until 1937. Anticipating Austria's annexation, he accepted a position as a philosophy lecturer at Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he remained for the next nine years. During this time, he wrote his seminal work, "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945), which analyzed hidden totalitarian motives in the teachings of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. This book, which Popper referred to as his "contribution to the war effort," established him as a globally renowned philosopher.

In 1946, upon receiving an offer from the London School of Economics, Popper relocated to England. He was appointed as a professor at LSE in 1949, knighted in 1965, and dedicated the rest of his life to philosophy. He passed away in Croydon, England on September 17, 1994.